Trade Route

Trade Route
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Prosperity
Illustrator(s)	Harald Lieske
Card text
+1 Buy Trash a card from your hand. + per Coin token on the Trade Route mat. Setup: Add a Coin token to each Victory Supply pile; move that token to the Trade Route mat when a card is gained from the pile.

Trade Route is an Action card from Prosperity. It trashes a card and gives money proportional to how many different Victory cards have been gained. It is a weak source of thinning and +Buy and was removed from the second edition of Prosperity.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• You get +1 Buy, and trash a card from your hand if you can.
• Then you get + per Coin token on the Trade Route mat.
• This card has setup; at the start of games using it, you put a Coin token on each Victory card pile being used (including Kingdom card piles such as Gardens, and Colonies if used).
• In the rare cases where there are more than 8 Victory piles, the tokens are not counter-limited; use a replacement.
• Whenever any player gains the first card from a Victory card pile - whether by buying it or otherwise gaining it - the Coin token is moved to the mat.
• So if no Victory cards have been gained this game, the mat has no tokens and Trade Route makes +; if four Provinces and one Estate have been gained, the mat has two tokens and Trade Route makes +.
• If you are using the promotional card Black Market, and Trade Route is in the Black Market deck, you do the setup for Trade Route.

Other Rules clarifications

• Certain Victory cards come from split piles that are not themselves Victory card piles, such as Dame Josephine and Territory; gaining them does not add a token to the Trade Route mat.
  • However Castles are a Victory Card pile.
• The Trade Route token on a pile will not move if the top card of a pile is removed without gaining it, such as when you trash it with Salt the Earth, or exile it with Way of the Worm or Enclave.
• If you gain a Victory card from the trash, you still move a Coin token from its Supply pile to the mat.
• You get + after trashing a card. So if you trash a Hunting Grounds and gain the first Duchy, that will increase the + you get from this.

Strategy

Before it was removed, Trade Route offered an additional Buy alongside both weak thinning in the early game and a weak payload effect later. As a terminal stop card that trashes only one card at a time and usually generates very little (if any) , Trade Route is very slow to improve your deck, and the best case scenarios for each of its abilities are somewhat at odds with one another, making for a generally low-value card.

Trade Route is undesirable as a primary method of thinning, although it can occasionally be worthwhile if the payoff for getting rid of junk is very high (e.g., there’s an extremely strong draw-to-X engine available). However, Trade Route is weak enough that it’s usually not worth trashing in this manner; for example, you may be better off investing in very strong draw as a more effective way to achieve deck control. Trade Route can sometimes be useful as a supplementary thinner (e.g., alongside a more restricted but powerful thinner such as Counterfeit), but it’s usually inefficient to spend resources to gain and play it to thin one or two Estates.

On top of its thinning problems, Trade Route is also a weak option for terminal payload. Although +Buy is often a very powerful effect for building that can be enough to make an otherwise weak card worth gaining, Trade Route is not a source of net gains due to the mandatory trashing effect. Functionally, therefore, the +Buy is useful primarily while you still have junk to trash; in order to use it to gain multiple Victory cards later in the game, you’re likely to need other gainers to provide fodder for it to trash, which severely limits its power. However, this means that the +Buy is most likely to be usable at the stage of the game in which Trade Route generates little or (more likely) no , since it is unlikely that players will be gaining Victory cards when there is still plenty of junk left in your deck, and therefore it is likely to be difficult to generate enough from a hand with Trade Route to take advantage of the extra Buy. In the late stages of the game once players have started greening, Trade Route may generate a more usable amount of , but by this point it is often too late for it to help much with thinning, and it is still likely that there are preferable payload cards as Trade Route is unlikely to be much better than a terminal silver. Rarely, in very sloggy games where you have both plenty of junk to trash and an extended Duchy dancing period, it’s possible that Trade Route’s trashing could be useful for getting rid of Curses and its generation better than a Silver.

External strategy articles

Note: Article(s) below are by individual authors and may not represent the community's current views on cards, but may provide more in-depth information or give historical perspective. Caveat emptor.

• theory's 2010 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Buy + per token on the Trade Route mat. Trash a card from your hand. Setup: Put a token on each Victory card Supply pile. When a card is gained from that pile, move the token to the Trade Route mat.	Prosperity	October 2010
		+1 Buy Trash a card from your hand. + per Coin token on the Trade Route mat. Setup: Add a Coin token to each Victory Supply pile; move that token to the Trade Route mat when a card is gained from the pile.	Prosperity (2016 printing)	February 2017

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	商路			+1 購買 移除手上一張卡片，商路板塊上每有一枚錢代幣就+。 起始設置：在每一個分數卡堆上放一個錢代幣；當卡片被獲得時將那枚錢代幣移到商路板塊上。
Czech	Obchodní stezka
Dutch	Handelsroute			+1 Aanschaf + per fiche op het handelsroutetableau. Vernietig 1 kaart uit je hand. Voorbereiding: leg 1 fiche op elke stapel overwinningskaarten. Wordt er een kaart van zo’n stapel gepakt, verplaats het fiche dan naar het handelsroutetableau.
Finnish	Kauppareitti
French	Route commerciale
German	Handelsroute			+1 Kauf + pro Marker auf dem Handelsrouten-Tableau. Entsorge eine Handkarte. Spielvorbereitung: Legt einen -Marker auf jeden Punktekarten-Stapel im Vorrat. Wird im Spiel die erste Karte eines Stapels genommen, legt den entsprechenden Marker auf das Handelsrouten-Tableau.	(2016) one or more other versions listed here
German	Handelsroute			+1 Kauf Entsorge eine deiner Handkarten. + pro Geldmarker auf dem Handelsrouten-Tableau. Spielvorbereitung: Legt auf jeden Punktekarten-Vorratsstapel einen Geldmarker; legt jenen auf das Handelsrouten-Tableau, wenn eine Karte von jenem Stapel genommen wird.	(Nachdruck 2021)
Italian	Mercante (lit. merchant)
Japanese	交易路 (pron. kōekiro)			+1 購入 手札1枚を廃棄する。交易路マットの上の交易路トークン1枚につき+。 準備:勝利点カードのサプライの山すべての上に交易路トークン1枚を追加する。その山のカード1枚を獲得するとき、交易路トークンを交易路マットの上に移動する。
Polish	Szlak handlowy			+1 zakup + za każdy żeton monety leżący na podkładce Szlaku handlowego. Wyrzuć na śmietnisko kartę z ręki. Przygotowanie do rozgrywki połóż żeton monety na każdym stosie kart Zwycięstwa w Zasobach. Kiedy gracz dodaje kartę z takiego stosu, należy przełożyć żeton na podkładkę Szlaku handlowego.	(2016)
Russian	Торговый Путь (pron. torgovy put')
Spanish	Ruta comercial

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

This started in the original 4th expansion, and migrated here in the great diaspora of interactive cards. The first version in the 4th expansion was "+1 Card +1 Buy +. If anyone got a Province this game, +1 Card." I fixed that up to a less-well-worded version of the card you know when I moved it to Prosperity. Late in the going it got a wording that used tokens and mentioned setup.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Other Secret History of the Prosperity Cards

Why does it cost 3?

if you ask why say Trade Route doesn't cost , the answer is, I didn't even consider it. It cost and we bought it. I wanted to have no 's in Prosperity, but I never thought, "I would make Trade Route cost but I don't want any 's."

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Let's Discuss Base Set Cards: Adventurer

Donald X.'s thoughts on Trade Route being weak

I guess this is testimony to the power of trashing even when it's bad? This is pretty bad, I mean uh. Normally you trash one card and get no +. If it's the only trashing, sure, trashing is that good, but so often there is something else. Now some games people make it good for you, they can't help it, and man, okay, you get it then.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, $3 Cost Card Rankings Bottom Half